Page 62 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Mamá,” he whispered as he clutched her hand. “Mamá.”
In the end, the counting had given him nothing. Jennifer Martinez, forty-five, had died of septicemia after getting a scratch on her arm, and she’d died without a chance to update her will, finish her unpublished articles, or say a lucid goodbye. She had died and revealed St. Sebastian’s counting game for what it was—a superstition, a vacant, futile shibboleth, a charm against monsters to be clutched by a child in the dark, a child too stupid to know its shabby contours and its cheapness.
Saint was twenty-two when she died. Too old for charms.
And yet sometimes, more than a year after her death now, St. Sebastian found himself playing the counting game again. Not for his mother, but for him, to earn more hours for himself to have.
So whe
n he’s sitting in Thornchapel’s library on a day off—rare now that Uncle Augie is this busy and needs his help, but when he does get a free day, it’s more precious than gold—he’ll look up from whatever stack of books he’s helping Poe annotate in the catalog and see the sunlight catching the hidden gold in her dark hair and listen to her humming to herself as she pages expertly through the books and he’ll start counting. One two three four . . .
He’ll count as many minutes as he can to be given more hours exactly like these, quiet and unflashy as they are, because sometimes when he’s in them and he sees how sweetly pleased Poe is just to be near him, just to chatter at him or work next to him—or very often, lay on the sofa with her head in his lap and take one of her deep, coma-like narcolepsy naps while he stares down at her lovely, sleeping face and counts and counts and counts—he thinks he might be so happy himself that he’s overflowing with it. Like a cup left out in the rain, such an extravagant fullness that it’s brimming over, that it’s running off him in glassy rivulets to pool at his feet, a lavish, wasteful flood of happiness because he can’t possibly hold it all, he can’t possibly save it all up for the dry and lonely days surely to come, and yet he still tries, he still counts, like the greedy man he is.
When he’s sitting in the library on one of those nights when everybody’s home, listening to Becket and Rebecca argue about God and gardens, listening to Poe talk about her struggle parsing the Record of Thornechapel Customs’s section on Beltane with its strange references and unfamiliar words, listening to Delphine and Auden gossip companionably about people they grew up with, gossiping so familiarly and lightly and affectionately that it’s almost impossible to believe that they have a broken engagement between them, that they’ve been anything more than best friends since the beginning—then St. Sebastian counts too. Each second is another minute, each minute is an hour of being with these people, beautiful and smart and so longed for by him that he wishes a giant storm would come and trap them all inside Thornchapel and they’d have to stay there forever, drinking and arguing and gossiping and laying all over each other like puppies in a cardboard box.
One two three four . . .
The first Monday Auden comes into the public library, St. Sebastian doesn’t even notice him at first, that’s how antithetical the library is with the presence of someone like Auden Guest. This bland, soulless library with its dirty rendered exterior and nubby carpet the color of a January sky, with its prefabricated shelves that someone had gamely tried to paint in a cheerful scheme of yellow and blue—but the shelf surfaces had repelled the paint, so now it bubbles and peels off in long strips, and the blue and yellow look flat and sickly under the fluorescent lights anyway.
Everything about this building is ordinary and mediocre, including him, and for the last three years, he’s found comfort in it, comfort in knowing that no one here notices how cheaply made his clothes are, knowing that his lip piercing is scowled at because it represents youth or rebellion and not because it represents a transparently obvious need to recreate one of the few moments in his past when he felt truly seen. Knowing that his lack of education, his lack of money, his lack of everything is neutralized by his competency, by his expertise in this one, unimportant corner of the world; here he is a king of sorts, a king of RFID tags and overdue fines and new book displays.
It never occurs to him, even in his robust and varied fantasy life, to imagine a real king coming to his paltry little kingdom and standing inside it. It is so outside the realm of possibility that it could happen that even when Saint looks up from the circulation desk to see Auden in front of him, a hand casually in his pocket, his cheeks ruddy from the brisk wind and his honey-brown hair tousled from the same, he still can’t believe it. He must be dreaming this, this is some kind of sex-starved hallucination, perhaps he’s going to wake up alone in bed with an aching cock and a heart that aches even worse.
But no, there’s no dream. Auden’s mouth twists at the corner—not up or down, not a smile or a frown—and St. Sebastian recognizes it as a look of determined resignation. Which is something even St. Sebastian is not masochistic enough to fantasize about: Auden looking down at him with resignation.
And strangely enough, that comforts Saint as much as it hurts him. If it hurts him, then it must be real.
“Can I help you?” he asks, and Auden considers his question.
“I think we can help each other,” Auden says after a moment.
“Oh?” St. Sebastian asks. Casually, like it doesn’t matter that Auden is here with tousled hair and a twist to his mouth.
Auden doesn’t clarify. He says instead, “What do you do here?”
St. Sebastian wishes suddenly that he were Proserpina, that he had rarified knowledge, a graduate degree, any library job more arcane and interesting than the one he actually has, a job of small drudgeries and no excitement. No matter that he likes it; he just wishes he could impress Auden with his answer, instead of having to deliver the underwhelming truth. “I’ll shelve for a while. Check some books back in. Stock the displays.”
Auden nods as seriously as if St. Sebastian told him he was going to perform a heart transplant.
“All right, then,” Auden says. “Then I’ll help.”
And he does.
Half-disbelieving and all wary, St. Sebastian gets up from the desk and pulls out a cart of nonfiction fresh from the book return. He shows Auden how to shelve, watching as he pulls his clear-framed glasses out of his pocket and bends over the books, checking and double-checking the labels to make sure he’s shelving them right. And then together they shelve in silence, working shoulder to shoulder for nearly an hour. Only two patrons come in during the hour, and so St. Sebastian has lots of time to surreptitiously study Auden as Auden fits the books between the others, as he uses the outside edge of his hand to nudge all of the spines into a perfectly straight line after he’s done with a row.
St. Sebastian is reminded dizzyingly of the time they went swimming in the Thorne River, of looking at Auden in his designer black briefs and with his expensive watch and feeling inadequate—or feeling something more complicated than mere inadequacy, feeling like a novice, feeling like one of Plato’s cave people at the mouth of their cave, gaping and blinking at the real world with all its brightness and colors and depth.
Although now it’s like someone from the real world has instead come into the cave, has come into the world of shadows, and so here’s Auden’s everyday brogues, which cost more than two months of St. Sebastian’s rent, on the dull gray carpet. Here’s Auden’s fingers, normally moving nimble and brilliant over plans and drafting tables and tiny models built out of paper-thin birch and basswood and styrene, handling stained cookbooks and dog-eared gardening guides. Here’s Auden’s eternally faceted hazel eyes on the peeling-paint shelves. And here’s his mind—sharp, arrogant, made for form and shape and color and light—bent to the numbing task of menial work so repetitive that St. Sebastian usually doesn’t even remember doing it.
Why is he here? St. Sebastian wonders. Why is he doing this to himself? To me?
But then St. Sebastian remembers the money, and his discomfort and awe fades into irritation. To anger, and to shame, because St. Sebastian might be furious about the fact that Auden tried to hurt his family, but unlike Auden’s presence at the library today, St. Sebastian doesn’t have to ask himself why Auden did it. He knows why Auden did it, he doesn’t need to ask. In fact, he doesn’t need to ask anything, not one single goddamned thing.
Except after they shelve that cart, and then three more, Auden finally glances at the large watch on his wrist and says, “I should go,” and St. Sebastian can’t help but blurt, “What was the M for?”
Auden stills, glances at St. Sebastian without lifting his head from where he’d bent it to look at his watch. “It was a long time ago, Saint,” he says.
“Surely you remember. And it wasn’t for mistake.”
